Product Description

Office Home and Student 2007 is the software suite that helps people easily create great-looking documents, worksheets and presentations, as well as manage notes and information at home It offers improved menus and tools, enhanced graphics and formatting capabilities, new time management tools, and greater reliability and security

Product Description   Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 - complete package     Category   Office applications     Subcategory   Office applications - office suite     License Type   Complete package     License Qty   3 PC in one househol

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2 in Software
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 79G-00007
• Released on: 2007-01-30
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows XP
• Format: CD-ROM
• Dimensions: 1.50" h x 5.30" w x 7.30" l, .66 pounds

Manufacturer's Description:
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 is the essential software suite for home computer users and includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote. This system enables you to quickly and easily create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and organize your notes and information in one place, making it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done. This updated version features a new streamlined user interface that exposes commonly used commands, enhanced graphics, and formatting capabilities that let you create high-quality documents, plus a powerful note and information organization tool, and more reliability and security with the document inspector tool and improved automatic document recovery. With these enhancements, Home and Student 2007 makes it a pleasure to complete schoolwork and other tasks at home.

Which edition of Office is right for you? View a comparison of Microsoft Office 2007 editions.

Create High-Quality Documents Home and Student 2007 gives you access to updated graphics, formatting galleries, and an intuitive user interface that exposes commonly used commands. These features enable you to easily produce high-quality documents that will make you proud. Improved picture, charting, and graphics tools help you produce better-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations more quickly, while a large library of standard charts, quick formatting tools, and SmartArt diagrams make it easy to include rich and stunning visuals and charts. The results-oriented user interface makes it easier for you to find and use product features so you can enhance your documents according to your specifications. More stable bullets and numbers, SmartArt diagrams, and graphics and charting galleries provide you with a wealth of other formatting choices. Meanwhile, document themes help ensure a consistent appearance among the documents you create in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to make working across the programs you use most more convenient. PowerPoint also features context-sensitive tabs and easy-to-use galleries that make it simple for you to include tables and other graphics in your documents. Enhanced Reliability and Security Features With an improved automatic Document Recovery tool and the new Document Inspector tool for removing personally identifiable information from your documents, Home and Student 2007 helps you work with more confidence and security. Thanks to these two features, you'll never have to worry about losing documents after a system failure or exposing your personal identification information or unwanted comments to others before sharing your documents. User-Friendly Operation Packed with innovative features and improvements, Home and Student 2007 has a streamlined interface and an enhanced Help system, including online tutorials with step-by-step instructions, so you can quickly learn the product and find the answers to your questions. In addition, command tabs on the results-oriented Ribbon reveal commonly used commands that previously appeared only in lengthy drop-down menus. The Help system also offers a smooth transition between the Help menu in the Microsoft Office system and Help on the Internet (when connected). Larger, more informative ScreenTips provide help concerning commands, and the command tabs themselves are context-sensitive, changing automatically depending upon the task that you are trying to complete, so you won't waste time figuring out the appropriate command. When you need more guidance, online tutorials provide step-by-step instructions for common tasks. Organize Notes and Information Home and Student 2007 includes OneNote, a digital notebook that helps you gather, organize, and search many types of information in one place. This means you can consolidate typed text, images, audio and video recordings, digital handwritten notes, Web clippings, and more on the same page. OneNote also provides flexible note-taking tools to help you organize information the way you want. Categorize important projects or information in a way that makes sense to you, using an easy-to-use layout of notebooks, sections, and pages. Type or organize content anywhere on the page and track important items with customisable note tags. To help keep you on track, the powerful Instant Search feature helps you to find information you are looking for quickly. With it you can even search handwritten notes, the text in images and scanned documents, and spoken words in audio recordings. Preview Changes and Spot Trends Home and Student 2007 saves you time by making it easier to format your Office documents with Live Preview. This tool lets you quickly preview proposed changes to your document while you're working on it without having to repeatedly search through layers of menus. Taking a look at your proposed formatting before committing to it lets you experiment without risk and can help minimize future edits. Excel features highly visual conditional formatting with new data bars, more colourful gradients, and icons that you can use to format data based on specific rules, so you can more easily identify key data trends, which can help you study and prepare written papers or reports. Create and Save Custom Slide Layouts PowerPoint lets you create presentations with ease using pre-built and user-defined custom slide layouts. With the custom layout feature you can quickly create the precise layout you envision without being bound by one of the prepackaged, standard layouts. You can then save your custom layout for use in future presentations. Broader Distribution of Your Documents Home and Student 2007's features aren't limited to the work you do at home; they extend to broader distribution of your documents and presentations. New support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) file formats helps ensure increased distribution and sharing of your documents with users on any platform. This is particularly ideal for either sharing documents with friends and families, or for presenting information and assignments in a computer-integrated class.	Insert graphics and charts such as these into your documents to make them more appealing. View larger.
	Use the new diagram and improved charting tools to create rich and stunning visuals and charts. View larger.
	Quick and easy-to-use table styles help your tables look great and consistent across Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations. View larger.
	The Document Inspector helps find and remove potentially sensitive "hidden" information from your documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. View larger.
	Office OneNote 2007 enables you to gather, organize, and search almost any type of information. The powerful search tool is shown here, with results highlighted in yellow. View larger.

Customer Reviews

Best Office Yet
Its easy to hate everything Microsoft (I too hate crossing Bill's palm with Amex as much as the next person) and its also true that Open Office 2 is a supberb piece of software - particularly given as its free. In fact I have been using Open Office exclusively - until now.

There's one thing that gives Office 2007 the edge over Open Office and that's the new ribbon interface. It really is brilliant and it really does increase productivity. Afterall, if it wasn't for the ribbon it would be just another office suite and I would stick with Open Office.

It seems though, that Microsoft really have sat with end users and really have taken notice of how people use their software and I think that the new user interface is a huge step forward in software interaction.

As a home user as well I don't think the £85ish that Amazon is asking for 3 licenses is particularly expensive. About £27.50 each which if you think back to the cost of the full proper office suite a couple of years ago is pretty good value.

Just bear in mind that the standard Home & Student pack doesn't come with Outlook which I suppose most home users won't miss (although I can't live without it so bought it separately from MS for £40 odd) but it does come with OneNote which is proving useful.

All in all if you're not sure whether you're ready for the jump to Office 07 then download the 60 trial version from Micrsoft's website. Just be warned if you do you may find yourself reaching for your credit card - I did!! (and a word of warning, its much cheaper to by the software from Amazon than to acitivate your demo version via Microsoft).

Value ......... or is it ?
Quite good value for software from Microsoft, and a must 'add on' for any student off to university, especially as it can legitimately be loaded onto three laptops or pc's at any one time - a bonus for families with more than one child or student whom may each have their own pc or laptop.

Others, not students, tempted to buy it for their basic office needs such as Word and Excel and Powerpoint, may perhaps first like to check and see if their employer is signed up to Microsofts 'Home User Program'. This allows employees to register with Microsoft and get a more fully loaded Office package for the price of the disk plus postage and packing, currently about £18.

Advanced user's nightmare
I'm writing this review after buying 4 copies for my company. As an advanced user (PowerPoint & Word) I used to give presentations for others on how to use the software to increase productivity.
I'll be short and focussed about my opinions. Firstly, the ribbon interface! It looks very pretty and is a great idea for anyone new to Office. For any advanced user though its a different story. Firstly it cannot be customised (by default), so if you built your own toolbars in earlier versions then you're out of luck. Secondly, and most frustratingly, is where all the icons are positioned. I think Microsoft, desperate to appear to be doing something new, have just randomly mixed up the icons! Luckily the right-mouse button is always as useful and contains the same contents as earlier versions. If you don't believe me, here's a very quick example: In Excel you want to add a new row. You click on INSERT, but there's no mention of it. Instead its under HOME (possible the most ambiguous name possible).
Another niggle is the endless amount of formatting options for emails. Given that Outlook uses its own Word format to code the message, its highly unlikely anyone reading your emails without the same Outlook version won't see anything near as pretty as the one you composed. Come on Microsoft - let's work to web standards please!
And as for the XPS file format... Dear Microsoft, the world uses PDF for read-only formats. Why try to re-invent the wheel and add yet another download for your IT department to deal with?
Once the confusion of the buttons passes, there's not much left to warrant the new release. It's new, it's flashy, but it just doesn't push the boundaries forward in the way that previous versions have done.